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Considering I've done my fair share of torrenting, xdcc, filesharing, usenet.. etc, not to mention having been online for coming up on 20 years now... I'm not exactly blind to how the net works.
+1
Sometimes I think it's a pleasure that some providers offers LEB's, not flats or houses.
Tor is a perfectly wonderful service. It's just a few people that ruin it for the rest of us. It's a sad reality, but people are heartless and even reading through this thread makes me think hosting companies are focusing more on the money then the Company<->Client relationship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/09/security_matters_0920?currentPage=all
It's a shame really.
Yup, that's why we all get into the LEB market, to strike it rich.
well... Silk Road isn't so bad (some drugs should be legal everywhere on this planet but governments prefer just to waste citizens' money to play their utterly stupid so-called "war on drugs"). I should mention that cannabis is 100% legal in Netherlands and Czech Republic.
All in all, huge part of Tor users just ruin this beautiful idea (illegal porn, selling weapons et cetera). :-(
+1 or even 1000
That's how the Internet will look in 5 years if people will continue acting like this. Come on, wake up! Go for it and read "1984" book, reality goes closer and closer to Orwell's fiction...
Agree 100%, I know absolutely nothing about selling houses which is why I work in IT.
This makes no sense. If we were focused more on money, why would we be disallowing Tor and turning those potential sales away? Conversely, it also shows that we care enough about our clients that we're not going to let one jackass put thousands of other VPSes in jeopardy.
If you want to be a stoner, that's your choice. But don't compare marijuana to the sick fucks that get off on watching a child be abused. That's two far different ballparks.
I really wish these crusaders would start realizing that Tor is not some amazing prophecy, just a tool. And like some past tools, it is heavily abused. Providers really don't care how noble you want us to think Tor is... what matters is the potential for damage. Sure, it's easy enough for you folks to say "get a lawyer, tell the cops they can't touch your hardware lol"... but that pretty much just reinforces how little experience you have outside your parents house.
Really getting tired of all the "Your government is controlling you" copy/pasting. It's almost as nauseous as the actual propaganda the governments try to sell us. Protip: If you actually care enough to make a different, DO SOMETHING. Don't just spew literature at folks and consider it to be "fighting the man".
It's not copy and paste, it's reality and you blindly believing in big brother's propaganda. Just like most of people. However it's not politics but server related forum so I'm going to EOT right here.
I'm not trying to compare. I've just said that:
and
also, WTF?
This is trolling so badly (he hits backspace here) not accepting that somebody can have good intentions and still tries to protect his higher values (like freedom).
P.S. why strike doesn't work? -test- see?
Try actually reading that entire paragraph, not just one line.
I very plainly stated my opinions on government propaganda as well.
So stating that low-impact narcotics are legal in certain countries has what to do with Tor, then?
Backspace? Anyways, I'm not trolling in the slightest. I'm just sick of people that are so gung-ho about expressing their political beliefs in community forums, but lack the conviction to actually make a difference. How often do you write your political representatives? When SOPA was on the table, what companies supporting the bill did you completely boycott? With ACTA now causing a stir, what actions other than posting on forums or facebook are you taking? Trying to preach to a provider is utterly pointless; we are just as bound by the law as you are. Only we have the responsibility of having to watch out for more than just ourselves.
The point is, having your own opinions is fantastic. But the bottom line is, it's up to the provider to determine how to best serve their clients. And from our perspective, forbidding services that can lead to unwanted government attention is the best way to keep our innocent clients online. Because no matter what our opinion is on Tor, all it takes is one nasty client to have our hardware seized.. and we would know nothing of it until after the fact.
Heh, I've been having that problem as well. Just use <del> as a replacement.
Example.People from poland was first on the streets. They was first in europe which forced government to stall or perhaps even back out of the treaty. You can't know if @ksx4system was there or not and what he's doing in life so for the sake of argument, don't use everything what cross your mind to prove your own right.
I am reading your arguments and I can understand your position as host regarding TOR knowing that you don't want potential troubles for few bucks however this doesn't make some clients position and their arguments necessary wrong. Just think about all arguments against IRC/abuse by some... and yet we both just like plenty others use IRC without being abusers. It's just matter of perspective not about someone being 100% correct in arguments and those which oppose blind idiots which have no clue...
That's why I asked :P
Yup... that pretty much sums up the entire issue right there. I honestly wish more folks would take a minute to consider issues like this from a provider's viewpoint, and not just as an end user.
Very true. Apologies if I've presented the wrong idea there; I'm not attempting to point out that someone's opinion is wrong. Just the point that, even though they may be legitimate users, there are others out there that will screw it up for the rest. And just because they personally only use a service for legitimate activity doesn't mean they should expect providers to take such a huge risk, or assume that every other user is just as innocent as they.
I get Christmas cards from mine, asking me to please stop
from slashdot blurb :
"In response, the information-freedom-focused Tor Project is testing a new tool it's calling 'obfsproxy,' or obfuscated proxy, which aims to make SSL or TLS traffic appear to be unencrypted traffic like HTTP or instant messaging data. While the tool currently only disguises SSL as the SOCKS protocol, in future versions it will aim to disguise encrypted traffic as any protocol the user chooses."
Sweet.. I don't use Tor, but whatever, don't want governments (or LEB providers) telling me what I can run on computers.
Quite a propos of this discussion, Iran just started a major censorship campaign on the eve of the anniversary of some guy taking over the country. You can read more about it on Hacker News and the Tor Project Blog. They are asking people to run the obfsproxy tool that charliecron mentioned.
This is why relay operators do what they do. Yeah, it sucks that so many people abuse the network, but that's the thing about anonymity. In a robust anonymity network, you can't differentiate the normal users from the abusers from the political activists -- and neither can the Iranian government. The real heroes are the exit node operators who take all the crap for what the abusers do, but do it anyway.
Aaargh, not that again...
Well, somebody (@Derek?) mentioned Silk Road shop where you can buy so-called low impact drugs and some other non-harmful to others things ("non-harmful" at least if you believe shop's owners).
Well, LEB providers can tell it to me - on the free market I can choose others (for example buy another box to fire up IRC bouncer like ZNC). Still, I fully agree with you when if comes to our computers (and probably Internet lines too)!
@Spirit, +1 or even 1000000, really.
@Aldryic: I couldn't join manifestation because I can't barely walk now (I had an accident few months ago but believe me, I would be the one screaming raw thruth as loud as possible to evil gov't. My time to fight will come too, I'll just have to speed up my recovery).
+1 for Tor and -1 for all the Tor haters :-) (yeah, really - no trolling intended)
I would also encourage anyone with a spare LEB to set up an obfuscated bridge (obfsproxy), following these directions. If you like playing with technical things, it might even be fun. Since it's a bridge, your IP address will not be publicly listed or linked to abuse. It won't even be entered into the standard bridge pool. When you contact the Tor Project, they will exclusively give it to Iranian insiders that they work with. You can talk all day about supporting privacy and freedom of speech. Now you can materially do something about it.
I understand this when we are talking about end nodes but, from the provider point of view, there are the same problems for middle nodes?
Shouldn't a middle node mainly avoid those problems?
If not, isn't possible a solution like a shared tor middle node on a crappy (dedicated) server (with an additional fee to use it, maybe), to avoid any service-sinterruption-caused-by-a-seizure?
Yes, abusers could do bad things using it. But an abuser is an abuser even without a tor node, I think.
As a customer, I'm not sure I'd really want to be a neighbor to an exit node on the same VPS node as me...
I run some tor nodes myself (though not at Edis) - Both EXIT and Bridge/Entry.
They don't cause as much absue as you seem to think with a proper configuration - I get maybe 10-15 Abuse messages per day, mostly from automated scripts.
In the meantime the nodes push a total 500-1000Mbit 24/7 all month long.
So the ration "(abuse*bw)=problems" seems to not work anymore for Tor.
We allowed middle-man nodes for awhile. But after a handful of eerily similar "Oh, I misunderstood" excuses after being suspended and ticketed for having an exit server, we just put an end to it completely.
Dude wtf... I handle all of abuse@ at BuyVM... and I don't get that many abuse messages per week with thousands of active services <_< If I ever had 15 in one day for a single user, they would be out the door.
"Dude wtf... I handle all of abuse@ at BuyVM... and I don't get that many abuse messages per week with thousands of active services <_< If I ever had 15 in one day for a single user, they would be out the door."
But abuse messages are just that, messages. You're assuming the one making the claim is ipso facto right. The truth is that the majority of complaints against exit nodes are DMCA notices, because they operate bots which trawl p2p networks, then do a simple whois lookup on the IP address and send a form email to the abuse contact (the "automated scripts" that he describes).
The law is on the side of exit nodes. They are basically service providers who relay (encrypted) traffic for other people. They did not generate and are not responsible for the traffic that they relay, any more than reddit / imgur are responsible for copyrighted images that users upload. They are protected by the Safe Harbor provision of the DMCA and other laws in the US, and those laws don't even apply to exit nodes outside the US.
Rights holders may strong arm you and say you must make a "good faith" effort to stop the infringing activity, but that's impossible when you don't know the source of the traffic. So in practice it becomes a head-butting game, but I've never seen a rights holder or anyone take an exit node or its service provider to court over this. Although I have seen some service providers shut down the nodes, despite the fact that the law was on their side.
In my experience, working directly with or talking to various exit node operators, the problem is upstream service providers who either have no balls or don't know the law. Most of them just want the (robot) abuse messages to go away, so they shut down the nodes.
It should be noted, however, that some exit nodes (even in the US) have been operating for years, despite receiving thousands of complaints in that time. So it's clearly possible, and definitely legal to operate an exit node. You just need a hosting provider with knowledge of the law and a willingness to defend you.
There's a huge difference between defending a single node, and having to deal with the headaches that a hundred of them will cause. You are more than welcome to help me handle abuse@ for awhile, and get a real taste of what providers have to deal with.
On the topic of 'knowledge of the law', I've seen quite a few folks bust out the "It's legal, don't be afraid"... but I've yet to see anyone reference the actual laws protecting providers. Nor have I seen anyone reference a legal case where a provider came out fine after being protected by said law.
The issue here is this.. if you colo a dedi from a company, you can likely have the IP range named to yourself, and you can receive and handle all of your abuse complaints to run your happy little network. VPS providers can't do this. We have thousands of clients, tens of thousands of IPs... so our choice is, Do we hire extra staff solely to put up with the additional headache an exit node will cause? Or do we simply tell folks that, if they want security, to run a VPN?
@Aldryic said: ... in ticket that we have permission to access their VPS ...
Then they can't resolve your issue!
What a freaky waste of bandwidth, how many are using up this amount? I mean really, I have a small service, but it is still over 20 nodes and I burn 100mbit between LA and Charlotte combined.
I would hate to run a Tor user on SolusVM with its awesome bandwidth limiting and calculating abilities.
Not directly, but I can provide a few google links to common issues and give assurance that the node is working fine. The rest is up to them.
@Aldryic
"Just the point that, even though they may be legitimate users (of The Internet), there are others out there that will screw it up for the rest. And just because they personally only use a service for legitimate activity doesn't mean they should expect providers to take such a huge risk, or assume that every other user is just as innocent as they." (here youhave it fixed a bit)
Same, some ppl send bombs through mail, we should close it down or force mailmen to open every enevelope, because might contain anthrax spores, some ppl use the money for crime, we should disallow cash, shops should not take huge risks accepting it, after all, there were thousands of shops closed (servers seized) in the last 3 years and that is a huge risk for shops (ISP) that wont risk their hard earned -cash- (plastic money) for such a thing, even more, will turn down and report their customers to uphold their righteous stand in front of the law-enforcers.
Major carriers will certainly disconnect any ISP that ever had torrents flowing through, because, you know, they should have L7 gateways and sniff all encrypted traffic to make sure no bit passes without being inspected, logged and reported...
One day wireless will be illegal because ppl will make meshes to avoid the central servers of the internet where Big brother is wire-tapping everything. Encryption alone will be a reason to put you in jail because, you know, honest citizens have nothing to hide. Huge budgets will be used to give some fat-cat corporate bosses some money to study and detect steganography, algorithms to detect suspicious files and their sender/receiver to put in jail and torture them till they "confess" whatever the police would imagine.
To sum it up:
1. I want links with seized Tor nodes because they were Tor nodes and not just around in a datacenter that was hosting something illegal, indeed, or because the Operator broke the law.
2. I want excerpts from the law that show Tor is illegal, providers that allow Tor have any legal risk or the operators of such Tor nodes (UAE, China, Iran, etc not relevant since we dont host there), which require ISP to wiretap and police their VPS to prevent it being used for Tor or some other "illegal" activities.
Without at least one of the 2 points, any argument against Tor is just propaganda without any real grounds whatsoever. Some limited examples would also not void the arguments since we do not close Internet because some ppl use it to break the law.
M
Legality aside, I think the point you are missing is that those providers posting here don't want/need to allow tor and whatever potential repercussions may or may not happen. Why waist their time and energy what it can be put to better use. For those that do provide it and use it for good, more power to you and long may you continue. Oh and seeing as no one else post this...
!(http://tinyurl.com/7z87cwo)
^This.
In the end, it is up to the provider. One provider could state in their AUP that they don't allow the use of nginx. Yes it would be odd, but if that's not acceptable to you, move on and find another provider.
"P2P traffic still accounts for the lion's share of Internet traffic in all regions, clearing the 50 percent mark everywhere but the Middle East and North Africa." Last time I checked Tor had less than that.
@Deor and u4ia Perfectly understandable ! Nobody said they should be forced to allow something they dont want/cant afford to. The problem appeared when they started to spread lies and gov't propaganda with only rumours and hearsay as backup. No law was quoted, no case offered when Tor nodes have been seized (there are some, but I am not aware of any in the last 3-4 years and those that happened were mainly as colateral damage or because the operator broke the law, not because of Tor hosting per se).
I frankly fail to see why ppl that forbid Tor feel compelled to come to threads asking for Tor offers to say why they wont put an offer there...
Like, if I offer only shared hosting I would come to every VPS/dedicated/etc thread to explain why the ppl using those services are so horribly dangerous and villain...
Ppl, it is your right to interpret the law to prove anything hosted is illegal as well as carrying over any data or any encryption is shady since honest ppl dont have anything to hide, to consider porn illegal, to have any prejudice you seem fit, to disallow anything you dream over night, to fear the boogie man and the man in the moon, it is your business entirely, but why would you get involved in the discussion over a service you dont offer in the thread dedicated to that service ? What do you fear if OTHERS offer what you dont ? If you are right, your competition will soon be arrested and tortured, you will win even if they will only lose money with handling the automated abuse claims while you wont have that cost, they will certainly charge more and go under...
You WIN !!! Let the fools break their neck !
M